Director Alan Rudolph has consistently
demonstrated a fascination with the intellectual life of the 20s and
30s -
the romance of the famous intellectual roundtables, and the role
played by those
intellectual communities in the development of modernism in
the arts. Rudolph has done one film on Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin set
in New York (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle), and a second on
those who supped at Hemingway's moveable feast in Paris (The
Moderns). This is number three.

The other two circles of intellectuals
were well known. Most educated people are well aware of the
Algonquin Roundtable, which featured Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George
S. Kaufman, Alexander Woolcott, Edna Ferber, Haywood Broun, Franklin
P. Adams, Harpo and Groucho Marx and others. If you read an
occasional book, you also have at least some passing acquaintance
with the jazz age community of literati in Paris, which included
Papa Hemingway as well as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James
Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas
and others. If you think about it, it makes pretty good sense to
make movies about the gathering of such people, since the screenwriter does not have
to strain for sparkling dialogue. Bartlett's is filled with their
witticisms and profundities, so their own words create the wit of
the dialogue, leaving the screenwriter free to concentrate on
narrative.

The third group, the one which forms
the basis of Investigating Sex, is much more obscure than the others, and their
discussions were much more formal. Andre Breton invited the other
high priests of the surrealist movement to meet with him in twelve
sessions in which they would discuss sexuality in the most clinical
terms possible. Breton presided over the gatherings, and the guests
included some major figures in the art world like Luis Bu˝uel and
Salvador Dali. Breton seems to have assumed that these discussions
would result in some insights which should be shared with others, so
he had stenographers present at the meetings. Only two of the edited
transcripts were published contemporaneously, but eventually the
whole shootin' match made it into print in the form of a book by
Jose Pierre called Recherches Sur la sexualite archives du
surealisme. A translation of that book made its way into the
hands of Rudolph and/or his screenwriter, and thus was this film
spawned. (The location has been changed to a mansion in
Cambridge, Massachusetts and the characters are fictionalized.)

Frankly, it wasn't such a good subject
for a film, because the discussions had two inherent weaknesses:

1. The people talking really didn't
know any more about sex than any other group of people. What
qualifications does an abstract artist have for comparing the depth
of male and female orgasms? They were free thinkers, to be sure, but
their free thoughts were not especially useful in this context. If the group had
invited Picasso and Freud, maybe they would have had something worth
recording.

2. The people in this group, unlike
those in the Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein coteries, were not
known for their wit, but for their production. Moreover, they were instructed to
avoid showing off with any humor or other self-serving comments, and
they were adjured to stay as clinical as possible.

In other words, we are treated not to
the free-flowing conversations of noted wits discussing their areas
of expertise, but to the humorless ruminations of surrealist artists
forced to confine their conversation to clinical discussions of a
subject matter in which they have no clinical expertise.

Director Alan Rudolph is no fool. He
knew that the conversations alone were not suitable movie fodder, so
he tried to create a worthwhile film around the characters and their
interaction. The first question that came to mind must have been,
"Stenographers? Ordinary middle class women trained at secretarial
school, and used to transcribing dry discussions of tariffs and
laws? What must they have thought of these free-thinkers and their
clinical discussions of sex?" For the purposes of the cinema
discussions, the stenographers are asked to dress in sexy uniforms,
thus acting simultaneously as muses and recorders. The camera
watches the stenographers react to the artists, then the story follows how
the two women interact with the artists to form romantic and sexual
entanglements. One of the stenographers is a highly sexual woman who
can sense the pretension and ignorance in the discussions. The other
is in training to be an old maid, but gets liberated significantly
by her social interaction with the freest of her era's free
thinkers.

The conversations are enlivened
somewhat by the sex-crazed and perpetually inebriated owners of the
mansion, played as lusty old goats by Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld,
who does a nearly perfect impersonation of Zsa Zsa Gabor in some
scenes, although she was not capable of sustaining a consistent
accent. Rudolph and his screenwriter did yeoman's work to make as
much as they did of the film, and the cast is excellent and
attractive, but it just wasn't that good an idea to begin with, and
the film itself just isn't very interesting.

The film's ongoing distribution
problems are more interesting than what happens on film. Nick Nolte originally raised the
money to shoot the film. He found a German game show company which
was willing to finance it it in order to qualify for some German
government grants to the arts, which they could not have obtained
from game shows alone. To qualify for their grants, they just wanted
to make an intellectual film in Germany with a reputable director.
(Rudolph had no objection to filming in Berlin and calling it
Massachusetts. The story takes place almost entirely inside one
house, so the physical location is irrelevant.) Once the game show
boys had their grant safely in their pockets, however, greed changed
their minds and they wanted Rudolph to create a movie that could be
marketed as a sex film. Rudolph refused to re-cut his film to their
requirements, and they responded by sitting tight on their ownership
rights, so the various parties started to battle in the courts for
ownership of the film while it languished undistributed.

That was four years ago. The film has
still never been seen in the USA except at film festivals, and has
never been released on home video anywhere except Finland! (The
logic of Finnish exclusivity is something which still escapes me.)

DVD Info: This
film is not available on a Region 1 DVD, and is not
available on a VHS video tape. In fact, it is not available on
any home medium anywhere except Finland.

The Finnish All-Region DVD, however, while it has no
significant features, is clear and crisp. It has a widescreen
transfer, but is letterboxed, and is not anamorphically enhanced
for 16x9 screens. The menu is in Finnish, but there are only two
choices (play movie, select chapter), so you can't really go
very wrong. The film is in English.
The Finnish DVD info (in English) can be found
here. The U.S. distributor's home page can be found here. If you are thinking of buying DVDs from outside your
region, read
thisfirst. This particular DVD, however, should play
anywhere.

The meaning of the IMDb
score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics,
or a C- from our system.
Films rated below five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one
and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

My own
guideline: A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. C means it will only
appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover
appeal. (C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but
will be considered excellent by genre fans, while
C- indicates that it we found it to
be a poor movie although genre addicts find it watchable). D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre. F means that the film is not only
unappealing across-the-board, but technically
inept as well. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for
fans of that type of film. Any film rated B- or better is
recommended for just about anyone. We don't score films below C-
that often, because we like movies and we think that most of
them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know
that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below
C-.

Based on this description, this is a C-.
It's not a very involving movie, but it includes some excellent
male and female nudity which has rarely been seen.